History

Dawn Teele of the School of Arts and Sciences spoke about the suffrage movement and the problematic nature of framing the Nineteenth Amendment as an inevitable progression toward justice. Doing so, says Teele, feeds “into this idea that if only all of these excluded, downtrodden, marginalized groups could wait their turn or bide their time, then, miraculously, this change they’ve been waiting for will just appear.”

Eiichiro Azuma of the School of Arts and Sciences wrote about the experiences of Japanese Americans incarcerated in U.S. internment camps in the 1940s. The publisher of The Rafu Shimpo, a bilingual newspaper, “hid the rotary press, Japanese printing type, and other equipment under his building floorboards with an intention that he would come back to Los Angeles to resume the newspaper operation.”

Sally Gordon of the Law School and the School of Arts and Sciences spoke about the history behind the lack of protections for indigenous people’s sacred lands in the U.S. “The process of eliminating native power and consigning native Americans primarily to reservations meant the appropriation, through treaty or otherwise, of so many millions of acres.”

PIK Professor Ezekiel Emanuel penned an op-ed about James Buchanan, the country’s only “bachelor president.” Emanuel writes that in the mid-19th century, sexual orientation was generally considered “a private matter, and irrelevant to holding or performing public office.”